National Association of Congregational Christian Churches - History

History

For more details on this topic, see Congregational Christian Churches.

The NACCC belongs to the American Congregationalist tradition, which originated as part of the English Puritan movement, which was strongly influenced by Calvinism. By the early 20th century, Congregational churches affiliated with the National Council of Congregational Churches and participated in that body's 1931 merger with the General Convention of the Christian Church, which created the General Council of Congregational Christian Churches. The churches that eventually formed the NACCC opposed subsequent initiatives to merge the Congregational Christian Churches with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ.

Central to their opposition was the belief that the merger would create unwieldy bureaucracies that might impinge upon the historic freedom of the local congregation, one of the few ideas that have united this otherwise theologically diverse fellowship. These concerns drove activists, beginning after World War II when talks between the national entities of the two merging denominations reached the point of preliminary organization planning, to persuade local Congregational Christian churches to refuse their support to this movement. These clergy and laypeople first organized at a meeting in Evanston, Illinois, in 1947 to express their concerns about not only the possible loss of autonomy on behalf of individual churches, but also their contentions that the General Council of the CC Churches possessed no authority to enter its churches into any legal union with another denomination. Other related issues were control over missionary funds and a possible diversion of some of them into ministerial pension annuities; fears of imposition of creeds, confessions, and neo-orthodox theology onto their ministers (who generally favored a 19th-century liberal, tolerant outlook); and ownership of church property in cases of congregations withdrawing from the proposed UCC.

When the CC national General Council adopted a "Basis of Union" with the E&R Church in 1948, the dissenters organized into two groups: the Committee for the Continuation of Congregational Christian Churches, formed by the pastor of Los Angeles' Congregational Church of the Messiah, Harry R. Butman; and the League to Uphold Congregational Principles, led by a Hartford, Connecticut pastor, Henry Gray. These two groups conducted an extensive pamphlet and church-meeting campaign to forestall the merger process, despite the General Council's and the E&R General Synod's revision of the Basis in favor of explicit congregational autonomy. Their counterpart on the pro-UCC side of the denominational merger debate was the then-current CC general minister and president, Douglas Horton.

When these efforts only produced a small minority of sympathizers, some "continuing" clergy and laypeople in a Brooklyn congregation decided to take legal action, suing CC moderator Helen Kenyon in 1949, in order to place a legal restraint on the process. Some years later, after appellate courts reversed the lower court's finding in favor of the merger opponents, the activists turned instead to forming a new fellowship, with no legal claims to any portion of the assets of the majority.

Representatives from 102 U.S. congregational churches met at a Detroit hotel in 1955 to organize the NACCC as an alternative to joining the UCC. Because the existing denominational organization was being transferred to the UCC, the NACCC started out without any funds, staff, or organizational structure. Dr. Harry Johnson of Idaho, who previously been superintendent of the Inter-Mountain Conference of the Congregational Christian Churches, became its first Executive Secretary in 1956. He was succeeded in 1959 by Rev. Neil Swanson, minister of a church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Under Swanson's leadership, the first denominational office was established in Milwaukee. The NACCC moved into its own newly built headquarters building in Oak Creek in 1973.

All Congregational-heritage colleges except for Piedmont College in Georgia approved the UCC merger, which finally took place in 1957. Piedmont joined the UCC in the early 2000s while keeping its NACCC affiliation.